I, Muehlenhaus. U, Riedermaus.

Birgit got home and I took off to Jim Senson's (or something like that) Sports Bar in Plymouth or Wayzata... whatever. It was far away. A colleague from work found out I like watching football, and had invited me to hang with his Packer friends to see "the game of the season." It was only being shown in bars, because no one in the country owns the channel the game is on.

Caveat: I'm not a Packer fan. I grew up despising Brett Favre as a pain-killer addict Mississippi redneck with a Jesus complex. So I didn't exactly fit in. And it was difficult for me to hide my pleasure when Favre played probably the worst game I have ever seen him play. Two interceptions in 10 minutes! After the first one, I started shouting "Bring in the Kid!" Aaron Rodgers was drafted two or three years ago to replace Favre. Favre refuses to retire, so Aaron has sat on the bench for three years getting paid millions to style his hair. He is supposed to be good, though. He just never gets a chance to play. I wanted to see him play. I told everyone at the table that Favre was history and Rodgers was the future. (I just like to get under Packers fans' skins. It worked. One dude grabbed the bill of his baseball cap and thrusted the hat into my face saying, "I worship this man!" The hat had a number 4 and the word FAVRE etched onto it. Freak!

My dream came true. Down 24-10, the kid came in when someone finally took that overrated redneck out of the game by crashing their helmet into his throwing elbow. And...

The kid rocked. His first series he looked scared, but the next two series he completed 10 passes in a row -- Favre completed 3 of 12 with two interceptions or something ridiculous like that. He scored two touchdowns on two drives in a row. He scrambled for a couple of first downs. He drove the team for two more fieldgoals. He had no interceptions and passed for 200 yards. He brought the team back only to lose, because the Packers defense is the worst I have ever seen! (That Harris guy should be dumped off in Lake Michigan and told to swim to another team -- he cost them 60-some yards in personal foul penalties! That's giving a team starting at their own one yard line a handicap and placing the ball in field goal range. Ridiculous!

Anyway, if they keep playing Rodgers, I will cheer for the Packers. But if they bring in that over glorified, Trent Lott loving, gun-toting, stubble styling, pain-killer addict again... I'm going to stick with Tavaris Jackson and the Vikes. Not that anyone cares, but... so there!

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In other news, I have never seen so many big screen televisions in one place. It was incredible. I was getting vertigo! Even more surreal was the cowboy sitting in a booth by himself, staring everyone who walked past his table down, and throwing popcorn at Packers fans -- just itching for a fight.

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Today is a wild day. I'm sitting here during office hours right now, and then I have to run to Macalester to meet a professor and sit in on his lecture on the Post-Soviet Sphere. That should be really cool, as he looks like an interesting guy. Then, I am turning around and heading back to the University to see my adviser give a coffee hour talk.

More importantly, I think he finds out today if he gets another job or not, which would mean he leaves here to become vice provost of undergraduate education or something wild like that. I hope he gets it, just because I feel like he has taken enough crap from this department. It's time for him to move on to better things. But I am probably biased.

Then it is back home to finish this online map project I've been working on. It's coming along. After putting it off for years, I have finally learned Flash ActionScript. I don't know why I waited so long. You can do such cool stuff via coding that I could have never done before. So of course, now I want to totally revamp my site, the Muehlenhaus Studios site, and any site I can get my hands on to mess about with. But Birgit has gently reminded me that dissertation first, teaching second, messing about with websites third... She's like the voice of reason to my tendency to be compulsive about things -- like selling EVERYTHING on eBay for example. She reminded me that we may want to keep our car. But I digress...

I have nothing more to say. No spy stories. No Twins trade tirades. Nothing. I can only hope something big happens this weekend -- like the Twins ditch Johan to the Red Sox. Santana is the most overrated pitcher in baseball. He gives up more homeruns than he is worth. If we can get good young pitching and Liriano back, we will be fine. It would help to get an infield that can hit too, of course. Yeah, an infield. But those thoughts are for another day's entry. I've got to grade some map tests here.

Yes, I finally slept well and scholastic life is back on track. Amazing what a good night's sleep will do. I think I was nervous about the interview. I hadn't slept well for days. Quite bizarre, really, but the truth of the matter is that I am excited about the thought of teaching in another discipline, but I had absolutely no idea what to expect. I think that is what threw me off the most -- with the CIA I knew I was going to be polygraphed, and I knew I didn't really want to work for them. This, on the other hand... I didn't know how formal of an interview it would be, and I knew I wanted to work for IS. The mind is a real humdinger at times... it plays tricks on me.

I am working at home today cranking Bob Dylan's most recent album and working like a mad hatter on my dissertation. It is all coming together now! I'm going back to Donis Dondis and using her techniques of visual literacy to analyze political cartographic manipulations. It is going to be so cool! I'm finding a ton of good maps to dissect recently too. You know what is ironic is that, though Nazi Germany is renowned for their Geopolitik propaganda maps, the US has far superior, less campy propaganda maps from the same era. Most of them appeared in popular magazines, though, and were not as obviously tied to the state government. Life and Fortune magazines back in the 30s were littered with crazy propaganda maps, such as the one of Italy's ambitions in Ethiopia shown above. It is like a Edgar Allen Poe meets Mussolini in Wonderland!

Birgit and I are continuing our quest to be totally digital by 2009. Last night we nearly completed dismantling every single photo album we own. The pictures are now weeded out -- including a bunch of photos of people I don't remember from summer camp in 1984. The keepers, of which there are still thousands, have been sorted into photo boxes, which take up much less space and don't threaten to decompose the pictures with PVC or whatever chemical turns brown in 1980s photo albums. (Man, some of my pictures were actually decomposing in the album, inseparable from the page itself!) The goal is to now select the "best" photos for scanning. We hope to scan those and chuck them too. I have already been scanning old report cards and a ton of other childhood keepsake stuff that is covered in dust so I can just throw it out and not feel guilty -- Twins Homer Hanky be damned! It's been scanned. It is now a rag. Ha!

In other news, I'm bumming about the Matt Garza trade between the Twins and Rays. I'm not sure this was a wise move, but generally I am incorrect about such things and that is why I am not a baseball GM. Still, I liked the dude, and all we get in return as far as I can tell is someone who "might" become a good hitter, if he doesn't get thrown out of the league for throwing bats at umpires. I'm sure he will fit in well here in a state that can't even handle Randy Moss mock-mooning ("mock" mind you!) a bunch of Packers fans. Heavens to Betsy... whatever that means.

This winter break I will write up the surreal experience of being recruited by Langley. Note, I never applied -- they grabbed me at a geography conference and dragged me into a back room and then flew me out to DC and paid me in wads of cash (sans receipt) to reimburse me. Completely surreal. The place I went -- which was just like a Hollywood movie, with long white corridors that zig-zagged around led to nowhere in particular -- doesn't even show up on Google Maps or Google Earth. It doesn't bloody exist! Creepy. I think my German in-laws scared them away. Or that I hung out with a Soviet when going to school in China. Or maybe that my mum is former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's second cousin.

But what it really was, I think, was when I said I was an "internationalist"... the reaction of the interrogator basically said that I had struck out. "What do you mean by 'internationalist'?" was the response, as I recall. (He had a thick southern drawl and was inches from my face.) And instantly, I remembered John Kerry, foolishly saying that before invading a country to see if it has weapons the US should have waited for "an international consensus." This was in his first or second debate with Bush. The next morning Cheney lambasted him, with a ferocity that only Cheney could muster, for not being nationalist enough, even though Kerry of course has shrapnel in his arse and all Cheney has is a bum heart.

If the "internationalist" comment didn't result in a strike out, answering "yes" to the question of whether some people might consider me an extremist certainly did. Of course, I didn't know they meant extremist in the Timothy McVeigh or Osama bin Laden variety. I figured they thought voting for Jesse Ventura was extreme. But it was too late to explain, because by that point my blood pressure was high, my heart was pounding out of my chest, and I could feel sweat on my palms. I knew the gimmick was over. They had caught me. I was just seeing how far I could go, because it was so surreal.

I'm not the CIA type! I have a website made out of crayons!!! I like Charles Bukowski and Hunter S. Thompson novels! When I watch Platoon or Blackhawk Down, I critique them as instrumentalist tools to foster a "collective memory," not as movies showing how things were. I'm not even god fearing! Cripes... they recruited the wrong person. But at least they found their wits and realized this.

So I took the $1000 in cash they handed me and ran home to Birgit and Mette and decided the CIA isn't as dumb as the book "Legacy of Ashes" lets on. There is no way I belonged with them, and they figured it out, albeit quite slowly. The good news about the whole thing? I made $500 off the trip, which I suppose is like getting a tax rebate in a way.

But I have to save something to talk about when I write up about the entire experience over the holidays. So I will stop here. If I disappear before the holidays, please send an attorney to Camp Delta. They "asked" me not to tell people about the specific questions they asked during the actual polygraph exams. I haven't... The above questions were simply warm ups.

As I waited to be picked up by my cab after the second day of interrogation and psychological testing, my day dreams of making maps for the Secretary of State were rudely interrupted as 15 security guards ran out of nowhere, drawing their guns and shouting "Stop right now, "Mother f*cker!" on a car that had pulled up in the circle unexpectedly. It was an extremely terrified mother with two kids in the backseat who had taken a wrong turn and wound up entering their compound's parking lot instead of a nearby museum's. I was waiting for my cab as this happened thinking... "Who would want to work for, much less become one of, these assholes?"

Back to the dissertation. Dylan's "Modern Times" just ended. I think I should pop in one of his old school albums now.

Keep your eye out for an upcoming blog entry in December entitled: "Mamma didn't raise no spook!"

Just when I think everything is under control and cruising along, the winter solstice begins knocking on my door to steal away any sunshine that might have helped me enjoy the semester. Man, oh man, the post-Thanksgiving doldrums are here and real! Not only did Birgit and I finish the entire second season of Lost in record time, the third season doesn't come out on DVD until December 11th, and then the fourth season, which is supposed to start in February, may not even air if these writers don't get back to writing bad dramas! Once we got through the final DVD it quickly dawned on me that Lost was the only thing that had been keeping me emotionally afloat this semester, which summarizes my pitiful state. The show had so many subplots and characters to follow that I couldn't help but get lost in the soap opera ways of the show and forget about all the stress of grading, writing, and dealing with relative issues. Somehow, and very quickly as I had never seen an episode of this dang show before late September, I became a Lost junkie. Thank Buddha for Netflix!

What else is new? Still selling stuff on half.com and eBay. It is kind of streamlined now, with a pile of CDs I posted on the bottom shelf in my office, and bunch of padded envelopes bought in bulk from Sam's Club right next to them. An order comes in. I grab the CD or book, throw it in an envelope, slap on the address, and it goes out the door on my way to school. I feel like a pirate, running some illegal operation from home, but for the first time in my digital career, what I am doing is perfectly legal. Weird. Selling CDs... I didn't know people even bought CDs anymore.

Birgit and I have been more in-sync than ever recently. I like to think it is because whenever we get around her or my family we realize just how crazy they are and fall back on one another for support. Yeah, actually, that's totally it. We always get along better around the holidays when we have a chance to gripe about both of our relatives.

I had an interview yesterday with the International Studies department at Macalester College. It wasn't as surreal as my CIA interview last summer... oh yeah, more on that sometime. They didn't interrogate me or wire me up for two days like the spooks did. But somehow this interview was more stressful. I am not exactly sure what it was. With the CIA I was really relaxed, because it was the CIA, they could do what they want, and they wanted me, which felt really kind of cool. But Macalester frazzled me to the core. Maybe it is because I am a geographer first, and an IS person second, but something felt out of sync. I didn't sleep well the night before, though, so maybe nothing was out of the ordinary except my expectations.

Going to meet Glen now to play some cribbage. Gotta run. Here's the proof the spooks almost hired me!

So last weekend Birgit and I spent two-and-a-half days straight ripping our entire CD collection onto our external hard drive, sorting out CDs we never want to listen to again, posting these CDs to Half.com (our user name is ianoas on there if you want to support our cause and buy one), weeding out more books that we will never read again or never read to begin with, posting those on half.com, digging through old toys and other cheap, brittle plastic things in our basement and posting those online to eBay and... well, the picture summarizes our success. In the first weekend, and note we were posting these things throughout the weekend, we sold 20 things for over $100. Of course, Birgit lost $40 she took out from the ATM on Saturday night, and it cost $30 to ship everything... but still, weeding out scored us a $30 profit. Okay, only $12 after taxes. I still think the state deserves its share; so no worries. We've all seen what happens when you drive on bridges and don't pay your taxes. What?

Went up to UMD yesterday for GIS day. Scott Freundschuh invited a bunch of alums up. It was great meeting up with my old cohort and seeing where they wound up. Most of us are in Minnesota working with maps. One works with bears or something in a park. The students up there are still as cool as ever. They were very laid back, chill, and talking shit with the profs like nothing. It was great to roam the halls of my old stomping grounds and see Duluthians do geography again.

Hung out with Adam last weekend. Good times. Bullwinkles is the best bar at Seven Corners, though their popcorn is so salty that the next day my entire throat was raw and I sounded like Tom Waits.

Birgit and I are hooked on Lost. Almost through season two. I've never been suck(er)ed in by a show like this. It's intense!

That's all. Nothing really great to write about. Started my first pilot study of content analysis for my dissertation. Kicked it off with an anti-Nazi map. I'll post that too, just for ceremonial purposes. Prost!

Manu and I had an ongoing understanding that in the event that one of us should ever have kids, god forbid, we would swap roles as godparents of each other's kids. So I have been asked to be the godparent for a French kid that isn't born yet. Awesome!

There is still a long way to go, but I am stoked! I'm already thinking about how to screw this kid up -- not sure if it is a she or he yet. Already compiling great mix CDs for the little devil.

Birgit and I are invited to Voillans, France -- a village with a population not much larger than my Geography of Europe class -- to partake in the giant party and festivities after the child is born. It will be grand!

I'm stoked. Really fucking stoked! I'm thrilled for Manu, for France, for the world, and for an excuse to get back to France!

That was a weird entry, wasn't it? Gone now. It was meant for my Geog 3161 class. Oh well... Here's a cow to tide you over.